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Hormones help women spot supercute babies

Every parent thinks their baby is adorable but if you want to know the truth, ask a new mother. Young women are apparently much better at assessing cuteness than older women and men of all ages.

By manipulating facial features such as the size of the eyes and foreheads and cheek plumpness, researchers created super-cute baby faces, looks that only a mother could love, as well as faces in between.

Baby faces

Reiner Sprengelmeyer of the University of St Andrews in the UK, and his colleagues then presented dozens of volunteers with sets of two baby faces, one made artificially cuter than the other.

In 200 trials two dozen women aged 19 to 26 always performed well above chance in determining which face was cutest even when the “cuteness” difference between the faces was small. Older women and men and young men performed far worse on the trials, especially when faces differed little.

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Menopause

Interestingly, women aged 45 to 51 nearly equalled younger women in accuracy. Since many of these women are on the cusp of menopause, Sprengelmeyer’s team suggest that female reproductive hormones play a role. Of course, oestrogen and progesterone levels plummet after menopause.

Indeed, when his team compared women of the same age with comparable reproductive histories, some of whom had gone through the menopause, pre-menopausal women bested women who were no longer fertile. Women on birth control, which boosts levels of reproductive hormones, also judged cuteness better than women off the pill, Sprengelmeyer’s team discovered.

Emotional response

Exactly how hormones help women judge cuteness is blurry, he says. Perhaps, hormones such as oestrogen and progesterone provoke a stronger emotional response to a baby’s face, Sprengelmeyer says. Certainly, a simple test of visual acuity detected no difference in eye sight between young and old women or those with higher or lower amounts of reproductive hormones coursing through their bodies.

Oestrogen and testosterone affect how women and men perceive adult faces, notesBenedict Jones, a psychologist at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. “This really emphasises just how pervasive the effects of hormones are on how women perceive faces,” he says.

Sprengelmeyer wonders if increased sensitivity to cuteness could help mothers bond with their children or determine how much doting the baby needs. “It may well be that cute babies look more vulnerable and therefore need more care and attention.” he says.